Fla Gov. Scott Seeks to Privatize State Prisons

TALLAHASSEE — For years lawmakers have toughened Florida's sentencing laws and created the nation's third-largest prison system, but Gov. Rick Scott is seeking to shrink the number of state-run facilities for Florida's convicts.

Under a prison plan that he says would save $82.4 million, Scott wants to cut 1,690 state corrections jobs, move as many as 1,500 inmates from state lock-ups to privately run prisons and close two still-unnamed state correctional institutions.

The plan is meeting some strong resistance. Sen. Mike Fasano, R-New Port Richey, who leads the Senate committee that oversees prison spending, last week called it "dead on arrival."

He said it made no sense to put 619 corrections officers out of work by sending convicts to privately run prisons, especially when state facilities currently have thousands of open beds. The moves would increase revenues to companies that operate private prisons, because they're paid per inmate housed.

"Why are we putting these 619 families out of work?" Fasano asked.

"Private prisons make a profit on the New York Stock Exchange," he said in an interview. "Government should not be in the business of helping companies make a profit, and that's what we're doing here."

Scott aims to use as much as $10 million of the proposed $82.4 million in savings for substance-abuse and education programs that he hopes will keep some inmates from returning to prisons.

Scott also expects to eliminate more than 1,000 other jobs by closing prisons and not replacing some employees who quit. Who and where these workers are hasn't been specified.

"[M]y focus is what are the things that we can do to do a good job of taking care of our prison system, watching how we spend the money, making sure that when people leave prison that they don't come back," Scott said Thursday. "Everybody's had to tighten their belts; we've got to do that in the state."

Scott also wants to privatize the state's three remaining public mental hospitals, three centers for the developmentally disabled and six veterans' homes, for a savings of $103.9 million.

The hospitals and centers are in Chattahoochee, Macclenny, Marianna and Gainesville. Seven hundred veterans live in the six nursing homes scattered around the state, including one in Pembroke Pines.

Privatization in Florida is nothing new; the first three private prisons opened in Florida in 1995, according to the Department of Corrections.

Three companies with lobbyists in Tallahassee have reaped lucrative contracts by taking over state prisons and mental hospitals. One Boca Raton company, GEO Group, manages two of the state's seven private prisons and four of its seven mental-health facilities.

Corrections Corp. of America, headquartered in Nashville, Tenn., runs four prisons, and Management Training Corp., based in Utah, runs one.

Those three companies are prime financiers of the Republican Party. GEO Group alone gave more than $400,000 to the party in the past election cycle and another $25,000 to Scott's inaugural bash.

Geo Group's lobbyist, Brian Ballard, hosted Scott at his Tallahassee home to watch the Super Bowl. He also helped raise $3 million for Scott's inaugural.

Private prisons are required to operate at 7 percent less cost than state prisons. While the seven in Florida appear to do that, it is a murky calculation because no two facilities are exactly the same, legislative policy analyst Byron Brown told the Senate Committee on Criminal Justice last week.

The largest chunk of savings — 10 percent — comes from the state's contribution to corrections officers' pensions, he said.

The Police Benevolent Association, which represents state corrections officers, calls the privatization move political payback. The PBA, which backed Democrat Alex Sink last year in her run for governor, ran a commercial showing violent inmates being released from prisons as a consequence of Scott's campaign pledge to cut $1 billion from the prison system's $2.3 billion budget.

"It's really just a gift to the private-prison industry," said David Murrell, the PBA's director of legislative services. "It's very political. The private corporations have been very helpful to the governor and his people."

Prison guards start out earning $31,900 a year, haven't seen raises in five years and are now smarting from Scott's proposal to require state workers to contribute 5 percent of their paychecks to their pensions, he said.

Panhandle counties, home to a concentration of state institutions, would be especially impacted by prison closings and privatization.

It would equate with "economic devastation," in Jackson County where 40 percent of the jobs are at prisons, work camps and a mental hospital, said County Commissioner Jeremy Branch.

With a population of about 2,000, Sneads — the town closest to Apalachee Correctional Institution — has one grocery store, one pharmacy and two hardware stores, Branch said. The prison is the town's major wastewater-treatment customer, accounting for about 40 percent of its entire annual revenue, he said.

All would feel the economic impact if the prison were to close, he said.

"The snowball effect of those dollars, of those paychecks, they're just tremendous," Branch said. "There's a huge misconception relating to what public institutions provide to private, small businesses in rural communities."

Tallahassee reporter Aaron Deslatte contributed to this report.

tealanez@tribune.com.

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Fla Gov. Scott Seeks to Privatize State Prisons